Weekly Whiskey Tango Foxtrot - Vol. I

This is the first of what will hopefully be a weekly blog post on things throughout the week that just made me think, WTF?!? Maybe it'll do the same for you.

Apparently, it has now been decided it'll be cool to publicly show porn on a public university campus. BYOT, I'd imagine.

The tobacco tax passed back in January went into effect this week, raising federal taxes on cigarettes from $0.39 to $1.01, chewing tobacco from $0.195/lb to $0.50/lb, and, get this, loose tobacco from $1.10/lb to almost TWENTY FIVE DOLLARS/lb. ($24.78/lb). Now, I'm a huge opponent of tobacco in every form, but HOLY CRAP. That cigarette tax is the single largest increase ever, and is more than ALL prior increases combined! The kicker is that these taxes are designed to pay for SCHIP - which is a federal program that provides funds for child health insurance (uninsured children). As an aside - this is designed to cover kids whose family makes too much for Medicaid, but are still uninsured. So what's the point of having a Medicaid limit then? Anyway, what's ridiculous about this is that funding for SCHIP was expanded and these taxes are designed to cover that expansion...only the real effect will be that smoking will decrease but the spending most definitely will not, so rest assured that we'll see another tax on something else to cover the shortfalls in the projected revenues. So much for that promise that "nobody under $250,000 would see one penny of tax increase." Maybe they didn't know that most smokers are in that bracket...?

There was [GASP] another Obama nominee reported to have tax...er...problems. Thankfully, the Senate panel overseeing her hearing avoided the issue altogether. I mean, after all, once you find out a couple nominees have tax problems, what's the big deal with one more?

Obama gave the Queen an iPod. AN IPOD. Oh, how American! Man, he's on a roll with the gift-giving thing. The only thing he hasn't yet given is a subscription to Netflix and pack of hot dogs.

An ever-so-slight error in a White House fact has now been debunked and corrected. Apparently, 90% of guns used to commit crimes in Mexico do NOT come from the U.S. In truth, it's only 90% of the guns that are possibly U.S. in origin are actually U.S. guns. The fact is that only 17% of guns used in Mexico to commit crimes actually come from the U.S. Gee, that's, like, WAY off. Oops.

The U.S. House passed the Pay for Performance Act of 2009, yet another in a string of efforts to dictate American executive salaries rather than letting the business handle it. Look, putting a criminal like Ken Lay behind bars for breaking the law is completely acceptable and is why we have laws to begin with, but having a government body determine whether or not an executive should be paid X or Y is just ridiculous. Are they greedy? Yes! Do they get paid too much? That's up to the shareholders! Sports athletes get paid a lot too - are we going to dictate their salaries by government decree too?

Hmm...what else happened?

Oh yeah.

The U.S. Government did what, until recently, would have been unthinkable. They actually fired a private sector CEO. This, as I said yesterday, takes us one step closer to fascism. Deal with the devil, and you're gonna get burned. GM and Chrysler should never have accepted Government bailout money, and I applaud Ford for not taking any (so far).